She has no friends, no one in whom to confide, no one who cares.
She occupies a nebulous space, where the servants ignore her and her employers and their upper class acquaintances talk over her, refuse to look at her, and often forget her. But, she is not the equal of the servants, either. Even though she is from a “good” family, her relative impoverishment means that her employers see her as an inferior. Agnes’s first person narration allows readers to see the emotional toll her work takes on her.
The upper classes see themselves as superior, but they are no better than anyone else.īut, even though Anne Brontë clearly wishes to instruct her readers to love the good and to hate the bad, Agnes Grey is much more than a lesson on how to raise children. She will soon learn that money cannot make one happy. And the young lady who is so heartless will throw her life away on a morally debased lover because she desires his title and property. Agnes shows how the boy will grow up believing violence against inferior creatures makes him manly–he will learn to be violent against the weak (women and the lower classes) when he is a man. A young woman gratifies her vanity by flirting shamelessly with every man she sees. A young boy delights in torturing animals. She is given no power to punish, and the parents indulge the children’s every whim.įully aware that Agnes can do nothing to stop them, her charges give in to every wicked impulse they possess. Instead, Agnes finds that she is treated as socially inferior to the young people of whom she is in charge. They then will grow to love learning and virtue. She sets forth dreaming that her kindness and care will make her charges love her. Agnes spends much time describing how her work as a governess turns out to be nothing like she imagined. The first person narration of Agnes Grey can understandably lull readers into thinking that the book is merely a cautionary tale.
However, Agnes’s barely acknowledged indignation, her wounded pride, and her somewhat snobbish sense of her own moral superiority give Agnes Grey an emotional bite as it reveals the hardships faced by governesses when they went to live among those whose social rank was equal to their own, but whose greater wealth made it easy for them to treat their governesses poorly. On the face of it, the story might seem like a lesson, a boring work of Victorian morals. They are indulgent, cruel, careless, vain, and greedy. To do so, Agnes presents herself as the opposite of her employers. The emotionally even Agnes narrates the story of her time as a governess, carefully filtering her experiences to teach a moral about how various vices turn boys into violently oppressive men and girls into unhappy women.
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